Well that's because Chrome is busy doing random crap like this in the background - chrome://site-engagement/

I guess you've never checked ~/.mozilla/firefox/YOUR-PROFILE/places.sqlite which includes a record, including date & referer, for every time you visit a site. See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/Places... for documentation (or http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Mozilla_Firefox_3_History_... for unofficial documentation). Several hundred thousand rows here...

This is one of the things which really slows Firefox down for me. I often found in the past I had to blow away chunks of Sqlite in my profile to get back to a decent speed.

I really doubt that that feature has any performance impact. It looks like a bunch of counters.

Intended use cases are documented here: https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/site-en...

If you want to trace uses of it in the code, here is a reasonable place to start, I imagine: https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/chrome/browser/engageme...

every browser needs to have some counter like that if it wants to suggest pages when you open a new tab or something like that.

i think it's cool that you can see the actual ranking.

Dillo seems to be the fastest on mine. I imagine w3m would be faster, but I use it through Emacs which makes it a bit slower.